3 Reasons to Use a Transportation Management System (TMS)

Your production, your packing, your warehouse operation—it’s all streamlined and your business is feeling good. Until you need to get your shipments out the door, that is. Without visibility and automation, you can end up with delayed deliveries, duplicate payments, and unhappy customers.

Fortunately, having a powerful transportation management system (TMS) on your side can radically improve your shipping pain points. A state-of-the-art TMS, like MCG’s Transtream TMS, streamlines transportation processes across an entire enterprise—and thanks to recent technological changes, TMS software has become considerably more affordable and accessible.

Whether your organization processes 5 or 500,000 shipments per day, a TMS can be a major improvement over your current system. Here are a few of the most critical reasons why every business that ships freight can benefit from a robust transportation management system.

Always Find the Lowest-Cost Carrier

Lots of businesses stick with one or two parcel carrier services because it makes life easy. That way, there are fewer forms, price schedules, and people to contact. But easy can be expensive. When you use a TMS to automate carrier selection, you can choose the best option for the destination, at the best possible rates—every single time.

A transportation management system automates weighing, rating, address validation, labeling, shipping, and tracking for FedEx, UPS, USPS and hundreds of regional and local parcel carrier services across the globe. Rather than being at the mercy of a single carrier, consider a TMS like MCG’s, which puts your business in control and saves you both time and money.

Insight into Historical Shipment Activity and On-Time Deliveries

The potential freight savings from implementing a TMS are great, but they’re far from its only benefit. In fact, the analytics and reporting capabilities of a fully-featured TMS, like MCG’s Transtream, allow you to make smarter carrier decisions based on more information than freight cost alone—and since the reporting is automatic, you don’t have to devote time and manpower to it.

For instance, TMS reporting will reveal how often each carrier is delivering your shipments on time and whether or not the least cost carrier was used and if not why. If your lowest-cost carrier is only delivering on time for 60% of shipments, for example, this likely reveals an inefficiency, since you’ll lose more time and money dealing with unhappy customers than you would save from going with a less expensive carrier. Insights like these empower your business to make better decisions and ultimately improve the bottom line.

Reducing Data Entry Errors

By integrating your TMS with other systems, such as your warehouse management system (WMS) or enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, you can also ensure greater visibility of your entire operation and supply chain, from end to end.

The best part? With integrated systems that are able to communicate with each other, you’ll not only reduce the time you spend on data entry, but you’ll also reduce your data entry errors—and the wasted time you spend correcting those errors. You can then transfer that additional time and labor to more pressing issues and projects.

A Host of Other Benefits

With a robust TMS on your side, the benefits don’t end there. For example, with greater awareness of on-time deliveries, an important KPI, you’ll gain greater visibility into your operations and even improve your customer service.

Better reporting and analytics data for shipments can also improve your inventory planning and help you to reduce your on-hand inventory. Finally, automating payments through your TMS can save you additional cash by catching duplicate payments or inaccurate charges.

Best of all, recent technological changes, including cloud-based software development, has made it more affordable and realistic than ever for any business to acquire a best-in-class TMS, like Transtream from MCG.

MCG’s state-of-the-art TMS can automate your organization’s shipment processes, find the least-cost carrier, analyze on-time deliveries, and much, much more. To learn more about how MCG TMS can empower your business, get in touch with us today!